


Every Breath A New Day

by MercuryAlice



Category: Alias (TV)
Genre: Immortality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-12
Updated: 2016-10-12
Packaged: 2018-08-22 00:29:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8266063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryAlice/pseuds/MercuryAlice
Summary: Again he becomes the stick to Arvin’s carrot approach; going back to being the ton of bricks threatening to tumble down on those unfortunate enough to be disloyal, while Sloane pretends not to be the far more dangerous snake that he truly is. It’s another return to normalcy, however smoke screened it was. He watches Sloane turn back to Rambaldi like a drug addict turns back to heroin, and there’s something less about him.





	

It’s fifty years before they’re dug out by an oblivious construction team, and he has no idea how he fell into Sloane’s slip stream of immortality. But he wakes to sunlight, and his first thought is of Sydney. For a fraction of a second, he thinks maybe no time at all has passed and it’s an extraction somehow; despite the vivid memory of pressing the button. When he looks up, it isn’t Sydney but Arvin standing over him, looking for all the world like he’s triumphed. And Jack supposes in some way he has. He got what he wanted. He won. 

Somehow, he doesn’t know exactly how, Jack instinctively knows a fair bit of time has passed in between then and now. He pushes to his feet, finding he has nothing at all to say to the architect of his misfortune. Instead, he jack-knifes and walks away; ignoring the self assured ‘ _I can help you find her, Jack_ ’ called after him. Instead, possibly for the first time in his life, he well and truly walks away from Arvin Sloane with a feeling of utter finality; without a word.

It takes him two weeks to get back to the States, and in that time he plays catch up with the world. He finds it not much changed, frankly.

It takes much less time to find Sydney, or at least, where she was laid to rest nearly a decade early. In a quaint cemetery in Maine, Jack feels more adrift than he has in a long time.

He finds Sydney succeeded where he’d failed, having raised two children that had no ties to the intelligence world. Instead, they were a teacher and lawyer, respectively, with grown children of their own who also had no ties to his world.

Jack sees no reason to change that and put them at risk.

He keeps tabs, of course, but from afar as a ghost they’ll never knowingly meet. He sees Sydney in his youngest great grandchild and feels a hollowness that he buries with his daughter in his mind.

He moves on. To Europe, specifically. Three years later, he’s firmly established himself in freelance assassination and intelligence; retaking his old moniker of ‘Black Bird’ from his SD-6 days. It’s something of a return to normality. He’d always been his work, and now he had nothing to keep him back from the precipice of it. It takes what feels like no time at all for Black Bird rise through the ‘Most Wanted’ ranks of the intelligence world, and he finds he doesn’t care. He’s used to being the frightening story told around the proverbial fire.

It’s another ten years before he sees Arvin again, in Rome, sitting at a table outside a cafe around the corner from his latest temporary home. Waiting and unchanged. It’s his own fault, it wasn’t as if he was actively hiding from him.

Jack sits down and feels nothing in either direction, expression customarily blank of reaction. Arvin quirks a smile at that, and he finds he doesn’t immediately hate him for it like he thought he would. He isn’t at all surprised at either the fact that Arvin is now running an agency-- Acolyte-- or the fact that he asks him to join him as his right hand. It’s a spectre of being thirty again and being asked the same thing.

Jack accepts, and again becomes the stick to Arvin’s carrot approach; going back to being the ton of bricks threatening to tumble down on those unfortunate enough to be disloyal, while Sloane pretends not to be the far more dangerous snake that he truly is. It’s another return to normalcy, however smoke screened it was. He watches Sloane turn back to Rambaldi like a drug addict turns back to heroin, and there’s something less about him.

He does nothing to stop it, this time. The part of him that viciously wants to watch Arvin destroy himself is on par with the part of him that still sees the man he aligned himself with all those years ago in blind faith. They somehow cohabit without cancelling each other out, in an odd juxtaposition that leaves him apathetic.

As fatally flawed as Arvin was, he was also the only never ending thread in his life. At least the man was consistent.

Three hundred years later, on another continent and running yet another agency, he watches Sloane fall sharply down the cliff face of madness. The woman, though bearing an uncanny resemblance, isn’t really Emily. That doesn’t stop Arvin insinuating himself into her life as if she were. When she dies years later, it’s Jack who picks up the pieces; standing beside him at the funeral silently.

He learns from that, and when he sees the dead ringer for Irina a few decades later on a street in Beijing, he may stop dead in his tracks and feel like he’s hit by a train, but he lets the moment pass and doesn’t even run her through recognition software. He lets the option slip away through his fingers willingly and considers himself lucky to do so. Genetic repetition wasn’t going to be his stumbling block as it had been Sloane’s.

As the next millennium is on the brink of dawning, they stand side by side on a bridge over the Seine, having had a joint hand in shaping the last thousand years of history. As the sun rises on a new age, Jack walks away from him for the last time, this time without any animosity. Hands in jacket pockets, he walks away from the cement that links the last thousand years in tight packed never ending cycled obsession.

He doesn’t look back, and Arvin doesn’t stop him. Life goes on.


End file.
